Silas

Which would be fair enough.

First priority would be shiny new builds for my Corruptors who have functional but not fully pimped builds. Namely my Pain, Storm and TA. Purple them out, etc. I'd probably also go ahead and buy a Glad Def +3% IO for my Stalker. Currently working towards one with A-merits, but if I had enough cash that 3b wouldn't be a big hit to my funds, why the hell not

Then come the characters who have almost no IOs but I'd like slotted out. My Fire/MM Blaster and my Fire/Dark Brute. I'd probably make an alt NW build for my Fort too.

After that...some new project.

Or just skip Electron Haze. Neutron Bomb and Irradiate are plenty of AoE. Or as Roderick says, Electrifying Fences from Mu Mastery has -KB in it.

As the others have said, you don't need Hasten for SS. I also agree with WP working with just about anything. Mace or Axe also work, since they're somewhat more end-heavy primaries which isn't a problem for WP. They also have some AoE KD which helps in mitigating alphas which can be problematic for WP.

That question of alpha mitigation is why Stone and SS are such good pairings with WP. Fault and Footstomp are great for giving your regen time to work. Fire works well too, it just doesn't have any mitigation beyond killing stuff fast. Claws I personally wouldn't go with because one of your best AoEs (Shockwave) is gonna KB stuff out of RttC range.

DM might work well because you want stuff surrounding you for RttC so you'll also get good Soul Drains. The -tohit and SL also help your survival. Only problem is that as WP you don't really need Dark Consumption and you'll have almost no AoE until 40+ with Patron/Ancillary pools.

So I guess I'd say look into Mace or Axe, if you don't want to go Stone or SS.

Cardiac is super fantastic awesome on my Fire/Sonic Corruptor. Had end problems before so I needed Power Sink to keep me going. With Cardiac I was able to not only drop Power Sink but respec into Scorpion Shield so I'm softcapped to s/l to boot. Running more toggles, can spam my AoEs more and have less endurance issues.

Oh, and all of my shields are slightly buffed too. Oh and the cone on Fire Breath is too. Oh and the range on Blaze is too. Hooray for Cardiac!

I think a lot of people either like to buy round numbers/max levels of things or just check the highest level available because there tends to not be a great deal of supply at lower levels.

Personally, I almost always check the prices on stuff 1-2 levels below the max for a given item since its often much cheaper. A given IO could cost 10-20m less at 49 and only do fractions of a % less enhancement, which is moot given the enhancement values of the entire set.

The biggest buff for Heat Loss and Fulcrum Shift is always in the middle of the mob. If someone wants to get the buff, they should get used to moving in.

Staying in the backline with FS/HL means the caster and the people around them all get a mediocre buff, whereas they could move in and all get an awesome buff. Cold has ally shields and a +hp power to help people survive running into melee, Kin debuffs damage and has a huge AoE heal in melee range too.

With recharge you can have multiple Tar Patches out too. Tar Patch and QS have the same duration (45s) but Tar Patch has a 90s recharge whereas QS is 30s. That means QS is more than perma right out of the box, whereas Tar Patch needs recharge slotting.

On my Fire/Dark Corr I can doublestack Tar Patches all the time. 3 Recharge IOs or SOs will make Tar Patch just about perma without any global recharge or Hasten.

As for why Tar Patch takes longer to recharge, while the powers are almost identical, Tar Patch has -res whereas QS has -def. I see Tar Patch more as a -res power which does slow, whereas QS is primarily a slow power which happens to debuff defense. If Tar Patch recharged as quickly as QS you could get 2-3 of them out trivially easily from very low levels for 60 to 90% -resist. Which would be insane.

I think its more that they took a harder stance against PL and farming in the past. That's why the Dreck and Wolf maps got timers on them. I don't know if I'd say dumpster diving was an exploit. Do you know if a dev ever said it was?

Other than Statesman, who had Dumb Ideas about Things in general.

Its an interesting point though, since farming is running the same map or content over and over just purely for the rewards. Since there are only 2 trials right now, trying to get all your Incarnate stuff arguably requires you farm.

Its kinda why I wish they hadn't implemented a whole new reward system and currency. Or at least wish they'd have made old content and reward systems work with it too. Like the WST, I think that's a fantastic system. But with the trials, hardly anyone runs TFs anymore. Which is a shame. And yes, I know that Shards can be converted to Threads.

Breaking down all your TF rewards into Shards and converting them into Threads once a day at a decentish rate and multiple times at a terrible rate is not a great system.

March 29, 2012

Either way, I can tell you what I went with for my Fire/Rad.

I went Cardiac for the Alpha so I can spam my AoEs and run all my toggles with no problems at all. Will be going Reactive for Interface for even more damage/-res and Pyronic Judgement for Yet Another Huge Fireball. Destiny...I'm not sure. With Cardiac and the huge recovery from AM I doubt I'll want Ageless...probably gonna go with Barrier or Rebirth. While Rad already has a heal, the Rebirth one is much more powerful and Rad doesn't have +regen otherwise. Barrier is just nice all around. Clarion you don't really need since you've got mez resists in AM so whatever mezzes won't last long anyway.

As for Lore, not a clue :P

I like it a lot, looks much better

Forge you put on the damage dealers like Scrappers, Blasters, Doms, etc. People with high base damage. Painbringer you generally want to do the same, but with the consideration of squishiness since it gives a hefty regen buff too.

Fortitude is kinda one of those powers, except you can quite easily put it on several people. So you can put it on squishy people for the defense and put it on damage dealers for the +dam and +tohit.

Adrenaline Boost is more tricky. The recharge bonus is stupidly huge so as you say Rigel, putting it on people with long recharges is great. But it also confers huge +regen and +recovery, which might be better used elsewhere. Really, the only way you can go really wrong with AB is not using it as much as possible. I see a lot of Empaths only use it when people nuke and crash their endurance bars. Makes me sad.

Well, we wouldn't want anything to happen to that nice account of yours now would we?

/em knuckles

Your first build looks okay Deathleader, but the problem is you're spending a lot of slots in some places for relatively little benefit. 6 slotting RI and Fallout mainly. You're 6 slotting them for 2.5% s/l defense. I know Kinetic Combats are expensive, but they give you 3.75% for just 4 slots.

Using 1 or 2 powers (Brawl, Boxing) for KC mules will get you to the softcap with much less slot investment.

Lingering Radiation is also not slotted very well. You really want as much recharge on it as possible since its your main -regen power. Properly slotting it for recharge will knock 5-6 seconds off the recharge.

I personally wouldn't bother with Choking Cloud. Its a massive end hog, you don't have any other holds to stack it with other than EMP which will hold everything on its own anyway and you've got plenty of mitigation with softcapped s/l defense and your debuffs.

I'd also swap the recharge in Rain of Fire for an end rdx unless you're going with the Cardiac Alpha. RoF uses a huge chunk of endurance and the Posi set doesn't give you much end rdx at all.

Look at the build Elegost put together, it's really solid. Pretty much the only thing I'd change about it would be to take the Titanium Coatings out of Tough and drop Choking Cloud. The Tough slotting because those slots could be better used elsewhere (make Brawl a KC mule too, be able to slot Fallout for damage) and with softcapped s/l defense running Tough is mostly a waste. The Choking Cloud thing is more personal preference.

Ninjitsu. As Flux said, its arguably the best overall Stalker secondary. Very easily softcapped defenses, fast recharging heal and several utility powers.

Dark is also a decent secondary, but IMO defense based secondaries work much better for Stalkers. Not getting hit means you can re-hide faster as well as get AS off easier.

It's not so much the individual set choices which made me wonder, since as you say there's not a lot of different ways you can go with it to get high recharge and softcapped s/l.

What raised my eyebrow was how almost every power selection was at the same level as mine (the only stuff moved around being some of the singleslotted powers), the order of the frankenslotted stuff being identical (Forge), the Acrobatics slotting being identical to my old build (I've since dropped the second end rdx) so it looks a whole lot like my build just transposed to Fire/ with a few minor changes made.

As I said, I seriously don't mind people using my builds as templates or for ideas or whatever, that's why I post them in the guides. What I object to is my builds being presented as someone elses. If that's not the case here, alright, whatever. I'm not going to belabor this point any more.

In that situation I'd say the first solution would be to ask the person to stop spamming the KB powers. Generally, stuff not KBed all over the place = stuff neatly bundled up to be slaughtered = faster exp, inf and TF completion.

It's all about judgement and communication. Not just going off and doing your own thing. If the team is being slow, go back and help them. If someone is doing something stupid and counterproductive, ask them not to. I don't subscribe to the idea that if someone else is being a bad team player that it makes it okay for me to also be a bad team player.

Ultrawatt, Yes, lots of characters and builds can wipe out spawns so fast that its overkill for the entire team to stick together the whole time. For that exact reason, among others, is why I said in my guide in no uncertain terms that never straying from the team is just as stupid as never fighting alongside the team.

Fighting where the buffs and debuffs are you will always do more damage than solo. That's not debateable. Whether or not that extra damage is always neccessary is. That's why I urge judgement and doing whats best for the team. Always going off and doing your own thing is not it.

Freeing the Sybils is a good example of when to not stick with the team, because as joebartender says, they're very small spawns and having everyone involved will often make a mess of things.

Squishing spawns of minions is one thing, but on the ITF you've also got the Cysts. A bunch of AVs. The all-EB general spawn. A whole slew of EBs. Do you really believe you can drop all of those faster solo than you would with the team?

Splitting into smaller mini-teams is also something I've discussed in the guide. I've never advocated all 8 people staying together all the time. Because its stupid and wasteful. Just like always soloing on teams.

It's just that Fire is really, really good. Of my Corruptors, the majority are Fire but I've got several of the others. My /Cold and /Storm are Ice/, my /Kin and /Therm are Rad/, my TA is Archery and my old Thermal and Rad were Elec and Sonic respectively. There's plenty of reasons to go with the other sets though.

Ice for multiple rains and great ST mitigation in the holds.

Sonic for great -resistance debuffing and super safe soloing due to the cone sleep.

Rad for an awesome PBAoE attack and -def debuffing allowing you to slot Achilles Heel procs for -res.

Archery because Rain of Arrows is stupidly good. Blazing Arrow and Fistful ain't bad neither.

Dark has great utility and a self heal, damage is a little on the low side though.

Elec is pretty good on AoE, has good sapping but the value on that depends on playstyle and secondary. Little on the weak side for ST though.

AR has several great AoEs, downside is no tier3 blast and RoA is way better than Full Auto. Full Auto is damn cool though.

If you like AoE damage your best bet is probably Archery or Rad.

Uh huh.

Depends on situation. Always buffing the "strongest" or "weakest" is silly.